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Just 12 months after Uganda has been declared polio-free, the Ministry of Health has announced a fresh outbreak of this crippling and potentially fatal infectious disease in the country.
The Ugandan health ministry in an August 12 press statement said Uganda, like other countries in the continent, is experiencing an outbreak of a strain of polio dubbed “vaccine-derived polio virus type 2 (cVDPV2).”
It warned that up to 4.6 million children under five years are at high risk of contracting the virus, saying there is an urgent need to do mass polio vaccination within 120 days to interrupt the transmission.
Prof Pontiano Kaleebu, the director of Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), said the virus was discovered by their scientists a few weeks ago during a routine surveillance.
He said the vaccine-derived polio virus type 2 could have emerged because of changes in the genetic materials of the existing polio viruses.
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“This could be some mutations resulting from the vaccine we use [against polio] and that has always been a concern [to scientists]. The vaccines we use have attenuated virus and the virus could mutate and lead to this [new strain of polio virus],” he said.
